I t’s December 1989 and a young woman is sitting in a Bucharest theatre, watching a sold-out performance of Hamlet. The air is laden with danger. “Something is rotten in the state of Denmark,” Marcellus is about to say.
Nearly 35 years later that woman, my mum, still remembers how electric the atmosphere inside the theatre was. Everyone knew exactly what the line meant, but no one uttered a peep. It was common knowledge that secret police agents were watching.
Any hint of support for Marcellus’s words guaranteed arrest. On that day in early December, my mum couldn’t have imagined that within weeks, the Ceaușescu dictatorship would be over. That we’d always have enough food in the fridge, freedom of speech, freedom of choice over our bodies, agency.
That support for a line of Shakespeare wouldn’t mean arrest. That we’d be free. That I’d be sitting here, writing this, to you.
It’s December 1990 and my mum, our five suitcases, my pink potty and I have arrived in Luxembourg: straight into the heart of one of the EU’s founding member states. We were part of that first wave of eastern European migrants, bursting out of communist straitjackets, full of hope for the future. Full of ambition for the future.
Full of future. I got lucky. I think about the generations of women who’ve come before me: my great-grandmother, orphaned during the first world war, whose farm was expropriated by the communists after the second world war, and who died never having tasted.
